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Nov. 16, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:37:39
THE TRUTH ABOUT SIN! with Dr. Duke Pesta
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Alright, hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain, back with our good friend Dr.
Duke Pesta from FPE USA. Now, I will just tell you how this conversation came about, because it's been a while since we chatted.
I will tell you how this came about.
I wanted to do a show on sin.
Now, who's the first person I thought of when I thought of sin?
I needed somebody with deep, vivid, multi-decade experience who'd explored every aspect of No, I'm just kidding.
I just thought, you know, let's talk about it with Dr.
Pesta because he's very well learned in these matters in a theoretical, not necessarily an empirical or practical way.
So thanks for joining.
Just if you wanted to take a moment to reintroduce yourself to our audience or to my audience as yours.
Been a while. Welcome back.
Let it rip. Really wonderful to be with you again.
I've missed our conversations and I know my audience has missed them as well.
You're a remarkable guy, and I think the culture needs more like you.
I am a 30-year college professor.
I'm a conservative. I happen to also be a Christian, and so you can imagine I'm a bit of a unicorn crossed with a leprechaun.
You don't see Christian conservatives anywhere in the humanities programs, and so I am that, and I have written a lot, and I have spoke a lot on all kinds of educational issues, and of course, You and I have a wonderful series of interviews we've done on literature and culture and philosophy and politics.
You're going to send me a link to some of those, and I'll put them up on our show so people can trace those back.
I imagine maybe some of your audience would like to see them as well.
I'll close by saying, as a human being, I know a lot about sin philosophically and theologically, and I've certainly done my share of it.
Okay, now sin is one of these topics that drives me almost completely mental.
Whether that's the sin of impatience or incomprehension, I'm certainly willing to listen.
When I was younger, of course, I was raised a Christian, and of course I criticized that, and now that I'm older, it's kind of circling back.
It's like this giant parabolic boomerang for me, which is coming back, which is...
Let's talk about the origins of sin in the Garden of Eden and the Cain and Abel one, which completely drives me mental because it's self-generated.
Like you can say, well, Satan went to Eve, Eve went to Adam, that was the start of the fall.
But Cain just woke up on the wrong side of the bed and it went from there.
So let's talk a little bit about the origins of sin and the fall from grace.
And I guess it starts with, would you say it starts with Lucifer?
Because it has to be there before the Adam and Eve stuff.
Well, yeah. I mean, if indeed we're looking at this through the lens of Western culture, absolutely.
It starts with the creation of the universe, of course, by God, but the angels seem to have predated that to some degree.
And yes, there had to be rebellion.
There had to be somebody who...
To me, the origins of sin start with free will.
And from my perspective...
If we do not have free will, if human beings are either completely biological conditioned or sociologically conditioned or both to the degree that we have no real meaningful free will, and it's interesting, the more our culture moves away from the idea of God, particularly monotheism, the more we are hearing from our scientists and our sociologists that we really don't have freedom.
We're to some degree completely determined by our environments and our genetics.
So to me, the question of free will is the question of sin.
Because if you do have free will, and that includes as angels as well as human beings, if we have free will, then you can use it badly.
And whatever environmental factors kick in, that's still a good part of that is you.
And what is so important to the idea of sin to me is without sin, you really can make a huge argument that human beings can't choose badly.
They can only choose what they're programmed to choose.
And if we can only choose what we're programmed to do, you can't blame us for it, right?
And you are seeing this all across our culture now.
It's society's problem, not an individual's problem.
And if that's true, notice what we ignore.
What is society made up of?
Well, individuals, right?
So how is it possible that society can be evil, collectively choose evil?
They have the free will to do that, but the members of society don't.
And that's philosophically the thing for me.
I know that sin sounds like a bad word.
It seems just the word itself conjures up impressions of Torquemada and excessive guilt and unjust bullying.
I get it. But the word is important because when you get rid of it, there is no category left that allows for the individual's free will.
I'll throw this last point out to you and shut up.
There are three main ways that we really measure human behavior.
There is disease, there is crime, and there is sin.
Now, you remove sin, which we have done.
Notice what Marx said.
Marx said crime is simply people rebelling against a wicked society.
So it's not the fault of the criminal.
It's the culture.
And then, of course, notice what's happened in our culture with disease.
Pretty much everything from road rage to children's misbehavior is now a trauma or a level 3, level 2 psychological disorder.
And, of course, if somebody's sick, my favorite is CDD, Childhood Disobedience.
Yeah, CDC, I think it is Child Disobedience.
What's the word I'm looking for?
Childhood. Defiance.
Yeah, defiance. It's a trauma, right?
So when your kid steals a cookie from the cookie jar, well, he's not bad.
He didn't make a bad mistake. He's not a human being.
He's not a sinner. He just is sick.
So when you drop sin from the list of three, that requires you to either category human behavior, bad behavior, through disease or crime, and already you can see under the Marxist socialism, So crime isn't really the fault of the criminal anymore.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and the reclassification of addiction as a disease when it is in fact chosen behavior.
You know, those of us pushing in our 50s and so on, it's like, yeah, most of us have had a disease.
It kind of shows up on a scan and it's pretty serious and it's kind of objective, not behavior.
And yeah, the whole free will thing we can get into in a bit.
When I looked at what happens with Lucifer, what happens with Adam and Eve, right?
It seems to me that they say, I can become the law, right?
So God is the moral law.
We'll take that as a given.
God is the moral law, and they say, I can become the moral law.
And this is like Fauci saying, I am science.
This is like when people say, it's my truth.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no. If it's yours, it's subjective.
It might be your experience.
It might be something that's very real to you.
But when you say truth, you're talking about something objective.
And if we're talking about the moral law, can a human being become objective?
What I will is right, or as the Satanists say, the whole sum of the law shall be do what thou wilt, that you become the moral law.
Now, from a philosophical standpoint, that's insanity.
It's like saying, I can become logic.
I can become reality.
That's grandiosity where we take our limited three pounds of wetware consciousness and spray it all over the universe like it's some sort of objective physical force.
The idea, and this is I think modernity in a nutshell, as you were talking about, the postmodernism says both there are no rules and you are the rule.
And I think when you surmount your consciousness away from subjecting yourself to objective rules and standards, you create a kind of hell on earth because you get hypocrisy and vanity and no mediation of conflict.
If your will is absolute and my will is absolute and your will is the good and my will is the good, well, they're going to conflict.
and how do we resolve these conflicts?
Well we have to have some objective medium, whether it's God's law, whether it's reason,
science, math, logic, objectivity, whatever it's going to be.
The vanity that comes along with, I am the law, it's an old Southern cop, you know, I
am the law, what we have here is a failure to communicate.
The idea that we can become the law and we can surmount restrictions, well I think that's
the great demonology of the modern world that Christianity, I think solely Christianity,
really was fighting.
Yeah, and it's Judeo-Christianity, too.
The first commandment is, I am the Lord your God.
You cannot have strange gods before me.
In other words, that's exactly what you just said.
Even yourself can't be the strangest god, right?
Yeah. Well, Nietzsche said the same thing from the opposite perspective.
He said, we have murdered God, we philosophers, but, he said, in order to be worthy of the act, we men philosophers, we must become God to be worthy of the event.
And I think you explained it very well.
And the one thing I want to throw out there, based on your comment, when you say we can become the law, we start by saying God is the moral law, then people think they can become the law.
In other words, people think they're becoming gods.
Because to have that kind of moral control absolutely would make you God.
And so that first commandment, I mean, you go all the way back, three or five hundred years ago, that first commandment aptly labels this.
And the related thing to this is about, we're talking about the vanity of this.
And don't forget, Christianity formulated the seven deadly sins.
And the chief of the seven deadly sins was vanity, pride.
In fact, you don't really need the other six.
If you engage in pride, you are doing all of them.
Because what is gluttony? The pride of the gut over God.
What is lust? The pride of sexual gratification over God.
I think you said it very nicely.
You said it very interestingly, philosophically, and I'm kind of dragging it back a little bit to theology because here I don't think there's a liquid difference between the two things.
Well, and what did Satan say?
You shall be like God.
Right? That's what he said to Eve.
And the tree of knowledge of good and evil I've wrestled with, honestly, for decades.
It's kind of embarrassing.
I guess most people do, or at least I have.
Which is, okay, well, why wouldn't you want the knowledge of good and evil?
Why would God want to deny the knowledge of good and evil?
And it's like, no, no, no. He said, you get to define good and evil, not according to any objective standard.
But according to what's good for you in the moment.
And sin to me, I think the vanity thing I was thinking about quite a bit over the last couple of days, and that's really important, but hypocrisy, because I always compare it to animals.
Okay, what do we blame animals for?
Well, we don't blame animals for vanity.
There's not some poodle who's doing her hair and we think, oh my gosh, you know, Kim Kardashian of the four-legged beast.
And we don't criticize animals for hypocrisy.
And I think the sin, as I'm sort of working it through in my head, has a lot to do with when you claim a moral in order to do an evil.
That, to me, is the greatest of the sins.
Now, that's vanity, and in particular, that's hypocrisy.
You know, like all the people who say, oh, all I want to do is help the poor, and you say, oh, good, I've got a couple of people who are poor in the pickup truck.
They'd love to move in with you.
No, no, no. Are you kidding me?
Oh, you see this with migrants and so on.
Should we take more migrants? Yes.
Okay, here's some migrants. Can they come to your house?
Oh, Martha's Vineyard.
They got them out of there in like 48 hours, right?
So when you claim a moral virtue and do the opposite, to me, that is really the most foundational thing.
sin that there is because then you're saying there is an objective moral standard I'm going
to claim, I'm never going to live it myself, I'm only going to try and get the effects
of virtue without the cause of virtue, which again falls into the category of greed, but
it's saying what I will is the good.
Now we can say that if you're a perfect moral being like God, okay, what you will is the
good, but as fallible human beings our will cannot be defined as virtue because then you're
saying I am both an animal and a spiritual or soulful or conceptual being.
An animal, the will is the good.
Lion is hungry. His will is to eat the zebra.
He goes and eat the zebra. The zebra desires to run away.
They don't view it as the virtuous.
They don't define it as the abstract good.
It's just what you will is the good for you.
Okay, be that. Then don't claim morality.
But everyone claims morality in the modern world and then follows their own Nietzschean lust for power.
And that is, to me, the greatest sin because how can you reform that?
Well, you make a beautiful point.
Nietzsche's most famous for the idea of the will to power.
Well, how can you have a will to power if you have no will?
This is where we are in the postmodern.
At least Nietzsche was honest.
He believed there was no God and therefore human beings were just animals and animals
don't have free will because they don't have—they can't be hypocrites because they don't have
And if we're just animals, then the will is everything.
That's logical. I think it's wrongheaded, but it's logical.
The postmoderns have gone a completely different way.
And I have a slightly different take on the Garden of Eden and the knowledge of good and evil.
You said, right, correctly, that ultimately hypocrisy...
It is, right?
When you choose something, you just gave a wonderful description of virtue signaling.
Using virtue to aggrandize yourself, not the people you're supposed to be helping.
I think that's a clear definition of sin.
One A, one B, one C, that's pretty high up there.
But go back to the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
When I talk about this when I teach the Bible at the university, think about it for a second.
Adam and Eve were hypocrites.
And how so? Well, did they know the good?
This is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
But they knew the good.
We know, according to the Garden of Eden, God visited them.
He walked in the garden.
He held their hands.
He taught them. They knew what the good was.
The only thing they could learn from the tree was evil, and he warned them what evil was.
In the day thereon you eat, you will die.
I'm telling you what it is.
You don't have to put the little kid's hand on the glowing burner to figure out what a burn is.
You can warn them. I don't see that as a trap.
God was good.
They knew God.
God was intimately involved with them.
All they stood to learn from the tree was evil.
And he made that very clear.
And I go back to my point.
The tree of knowledge is free will.
It has to be. Because look, in the Garden of Eden, everything was made perfect.
Everything that was given to them was perfect.
They were perfect. So if God is actually going to give you free will, he must allow you to choose something that's not him.
And so without a tree of knowledge, there is no choice they could have made that would have resulted in anything else than God.
So if that was true, if God created the garden completely perfect, and there was no sin and no temptation in it, then you could not give credit to Adam and Eve for obedience.
Because whatever they chose was designed to funnel right back to God.
So there had to be something in the garden.
There had to be one little thing of all those trees and all that fruit Ready to be handed down to them without any work or labor.
No winters. There has to be something.
And that one tree is it.
And that tree is only half the problem.
Because I've already shown you what the good is.
When you were lonely, Adam, I created a woman.
I've shown you the good.
All you're going to get because you have to be able to choose a way out of the garden.
That's it. And that, my friend, to me, is exactly where free will comes into play.
God, theoretically, loves us so much that he must risk losing us to our own bad choices.
And here's something very, very well put, of course, as always.
What about this?
I've always been really fascinated by what Adam said to God when God said, hey, something wicked this way comes.
What's afoot? And Adam said, and God had not punished them at this point, not for eating the tree of knowledge of good and evil, not eating the fruit.
And Adam says something like, hey, man, The woman you gave me said something.
Do you remember that part? The woman that you gave me, your woman, she said something, man.
She just said something. And that, I think, is where the punishment, if you've been a parent, right, and I'm not a punishment kind of parent, but I do expect, you know, my kid to take responsibility as I sort of try to take responsibility as best I can.
I think the punishment starts not with the sin, but with the defense against it.
And that defense is really, really interesting.
Yeah. First of all, he blames God.
Hey man, you gave me the woman and she said something.
And so he starts with blaming God, not taking responsibility, and then he fogs, right?
He goes into fog land, into gaslighting, which is, well, she just said something.
He doesn't say...
Yeah, you know, you told me exactly what to do and what not to do.
And I agreed to it.
It wasn't a commandment. I agreed to it.
I signed on the dotted line.
It's not like, you know, they're not stealing from you if you sign on the dotted line and don't pay your bills, right?
So I agreed to do the right thing.
I messed up.
She listened to the snake.
I listened to her. It's absolutely on me, 100%.
I think that they would have been okay.
But when he says...
It's your fault, God, and stuff happened.
You know, how do you penetrate that?
I mean, God wasn't accusing them.
He knew. I mean, they literally had apple juice up there.
They had pits up their nose.
They had apples in their hair.
You know, like the kid with the chocolate face.
I haven't seen any chocolate today, Dad.
Right? So, he knows for an absolute fact that he's just asking them to take responsibility.
And he says, it's your fault and stuff happened.
And that is, I think, at least for me, just personally, that's where my anger usually comes with people or with myself.
It's not the wrongdoing.
It's the weaseling.
It's the blaming.
It's the projection. It's the manipulation.
It's the diffusion of clarity where people attempt to hide in this fog of nonsense and loosey-goosey definitions or reversing or changing definitions.
And it's not that he did wrong, it's that he would take absolutely no ownership.
He blamed Eve, he blamed God, and then, hey man, something happened.
And I think that's where it's like, okay, well, now we have the big problem, and I hope that's not wholly blasphemous to say, but in part it's like, the problem isn't that you did something wrong.
That's going to happen. The problem is that you blame me, but...
Blame Eve, blame the snake, and then dissolve all rational bonds of definition to say something happened.
I think you're right, especially about Adam.
But I think we can't divorce Adam, literally divorce him from Eve.
And so the chain of command here, the chain of behavior, is the serpent convinced Eve that she would be like God.
We've already covered this, right?
She, the serpent...
Brought about the fall of Eve because he promised her exactly what we're seeing today.
You will be the moral authority.
You will be bigger than God.
God and your husband are oppressing you because they're holding you back.
You're really the deity in this situation.
So her problem was an issue of pride, right?
And when she ate the apple...
Oh, sorry to interrupt.
Is it pride or vanity?
Well, it's both, because the serpent played on her potential vanity to make her choose something that turned out to be pride, right?
Vanity is literally loving yourself more than other people, and in this case, vanity and pride are kind of the same thing.
And vanitas, by the way, was a very useful synonym for pride going back to the Middle Ages.
And so to my perspective, he made her vain talking about how beautiful she was, how she was admired, how all the other creatures in the garden have conferred and they see her as the queen, not them.
So he basically became thousands of Instagram followers.
But go on. Please continue.
You got it. Selfies, right?
Intellectual selfies. And so she chose that.
Then she handed the fruit to her husband.
Now, I think you got a great point there.
He did not choose the fruit initially.
He chose to eat it because – and Milton in Paradise Lost, that wonderful – the greatest book we have about the Garden of Eden.
In Paradise Lost, Milton suggests that the sin of Adam is actually spiritual sloth.
He was too afraid to lose her, so he ate with her.
Milton dramatizes it.
It's the idea that he has to choose, in the split of that moment, God or her.
Because he knows exactly what the consequences are, as did she death.
And they know that death is radical separation.
So for him, you could make an argument.
I think there's a lot of merit in what you say about Adam.
Adam didn't do the first sin.
But we've got to also remember, this is Garden of Eden.
And I think what you said about Adam is really very relevant for us hundreds of thousands of years later.
But for Adam, there had been no sin.
There was no sin. There was no sin that you can experience with sin that would teach you That you have to own up to it, right?
I mean, this is all new territory, isn't it?
I mean, Adam, she sinned.
He didn't sin initially.
She did. How do you deal with that?
And I think his first recognition is, well, we know what death is.
It's separation. So do I, in the moment, choose to follow her or do I follow him?
And all of this, by the way, is speculative since because the The Bible doesn't go into the psychological motives of what Adam was thinking at the time.
But again, the only thing I would qualify based on what you said, this is new too.
There's no experiential examples that they have to move with going forward.
So they're inventing, this is the first evasion.
Just like Eve's is the first sin, Adam's is the first evasion of sin.
And I think you make a wonderful point.
That that, in some ways, is worse.
Ultimately, Adam's...
And I think God makes this clear.
Adam's sin is even worse than Eve's somehow.
Okay, so did Adam sin more than Eve?
I think you could make the case that Satan was very well versed in convincing people to do bad things and...
Therefore, Eve fell under the spell of a multi-millennial expert in lying and provoking vanity.
So that, I mean, Satan is nothing if not a very experienced sophist and a dangler of imaginary goods that cost you everything in the long run.
So, yes, whereas what was Adam subjecting himself to?
Well, you can say sort of fear of loss.
I did a speech some years ago in Orlando where I talked about how terrifying women are for
the majority of men because they hold our genetic survival in their hands, or I suppose
in their loins.
So if you are rejected by women, your bloodline ends.
And so we have a desire to conform to the preferences of women, because otherwise we are outcasts.
And even if we stay in the tribe, if no woman will mate with us or raise our children, our bloodline ends.
So the Darwinian impulse is to please women.
However... Because the men traditionally have been the holders of the moral law, women draw men away through sex, through seduction, through the biological reality that you need women, and of course women need men, but women generally choose, right? Men propose, women dispose.
Women choose the men and say yes or no.
And so I think that the Garden of Eden also says to men, you have a moral law and you have a biological imperative, right?
And the moral law must win.
Of course, the life of Jesus is the rejection of the biological imperative for the sake of the moral law.
And we'll get into the wages of sin is death in a bit, which I would like to talk in more detail on.
But we have... It's not just lust.
It's easy to sort of just say, well, just lust.
But it's also, I mean, family, the pleasures of reproductive life, not just sex, but, you know, kids and extended family.
And so I think the warning is also...
Women will tempt you with vanity, because vanity, thy name is woman.
I mean, men have their sins, of course, and pride and violence tend to be the male sins, and vanity and seduction tend to be the female sins.
But beware of women.
And I know this sounds misogynistic or negative towards women.
I absolutely love women, but we have to recognize the different sexes and their strengths and weaknesses.
And I think the God of Eden is saying...
You got a moral law and you got a woman.
And there's going to be times where you're going to have to choose.
And if you choose the woman over the moral law, which is the last generation of women...
Or men being destroyed in divorce, right?
Where they chose the woman over moral qualities.
And this is, I'm constantly, I feel like half my show is me telling men, choose quality, choose quality, choose quality.
Morality matters more than sexiness.
You know, the hot crazy matrix can be somewhat real because lots of people are willing to feed vanity just as Satan was.
So choose the moral law and you get love.
Choose the woman and you sin.
I think you're 100% right. And I go back to the Garden of Eden.
God, we didn't talk about as the creating of Adam and Eve.
Adam and Eve were not created at the same time, nor were they created in the same manner.
Adam was created exclusively for himself, right?
God took the dirt of the ground and molded with his own hands Adam and then kissed him.
Literally put his mouth on Adam's mouth and breathed into him.
Really remarkable, painstaking.
A woman, on the other hand, is a fragment of man, right?
Adam was put to sleep and out of a rib, right, comes woman.
And so they are not so clearly from the beginning, they are not.
The authority morally, and you said this, belongs to Adam.
He is morally responsible, like a father would be, not just for him, but for his wife as well.
And any kids that come, ultimately, the father, until they're of age, you are responsible for them.
That responsibility falls to the father, right?
Not the mother, to the father.
She nurtures, she weans, she loves, but that belongs to the father.
And so Adam is responsible for her.
So in other words, and this is the part that's always puzzled me about the story.
There's Eve, and she's doing the wrong thing.
What is he doing while she's doing it?
The Bible is not clear where Adam is.
Is he standing right next to her, or is he someplace else?
In Milton's Paradise Lost, he realized this was a problem, and he separated them.
They were different sides of the garden.
But according to this, apparently Adam was right there.
Because she hands it to him, right?
So if that's true, if we take the book completely literally, that he's standing there watching him, if he's standing there watching her, then he already, by not stopping her, Because he has a higher intellect than she does, right? And a more exalted moral position in the name of the family.
Then by letting her do that, why is he not talking her out of this?
Why is he not arguing against what the serpent is telling her?
If he's there, right?
Because all of this seems to be happening immediately.
And if you look at it from that perspective, then right away, her sin is his sin.
Because he fails to exercise, as you said, his fatherly or his husbandly responsibility to look after her morally, not just physically.
That makes sense to me.
Well, of course, when I talk to people who've suffered from things like affairs and so on, my general statement is, like health, sin is about prevention, much less cure.
By the time you're getting to cure...
You're a big mess.
And affairs, you know, people don't just meet and mate.
Like, it's a whole series of steps, and I think this is what you're saying.
He's seeing there Eve talking to the snake, and he should be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on.
It's you and me. This is a snake.
He's Satan. We've got God.
You know, we've got a good thing here, and you nip it in the bud, right?
To me, sin is all about nipping things in the bud.
You know, they just... A day or two ago, the DOJ has just talked about how they busted a prostitution ring that targets high-ranking politicians and tech giant CEOs and things like that.
And it's like, okay, so it's a lot easier to have integrity if you just don't go to the prostitution place.
No, just don't go to the prostitution place as opposed to, oh no, now they have compromising material on me and...
What am I going to do now?
Or, you know, how do we repair the marriage after the affair?
It's like, no, no, no. Someone's going to contact you.
They're going to be a little bit flirty.
Every public figure has this, right?
Somebody's going to contact you. They're going to be a little bit flirty.
And you say, nope, sorry, I'm married.
And you don't talk to them.
It's like stopping the avalanche when it's a snowflake is a whole lot easier than 90 million tons of snow running into your village.
And so the prevention thing is really important.
And maybe that's why he can't take responsibility.
Or maybe my thing where he said, hey man, the woman you gave me and then something happened.
Maybe it's because he didn't take responsibility in the prevention side that he then dodges responsibility on the aftermath side.
I think you are 100% correct.
Let me get a crass analogy.
It's as if Adam and Eve are sitting at a bar having a drink.
Because the fruit of the tree is alluring, right?
The smell of it, the look of it.
They're sitting there having a couple of drinks.
And sitting on the other side of Eve is a very buff guy who's flirting with her.
And the husband is, as she gets a little tipsy, the husband realizes that this flirtation is not good.
And any flirtation is not good.
But rather than intervene, he just keeps drinking his whiskey, right?
Getting more and more confused and hurt and angry as this goes on.
Because that's exactly what happens here.
I mean, again, in Paradise Lost...
Milton points out that it's a kind of a rape.
What the devil does to her is kind of a rape.
And so there's a great scene in the poem where as soon as she eats the fruit, immediately the snake becomes erect.
Literally, the serpent becomes a basic, a big phallus, right?
And it does a little dance in front of her.
This is a kind of rape.
And what you said I think is 100% correct.
Sin... Eve's sin is not eating the apple.
That is a foregone conclusion.
If she's flirting with this monster, and God warned them there would be a monster in the garden, that they should be careful, they should always be with each other, they should protect each other, because there's something in the garden.
So her sin was talking to it to begin with.
Her sin was allowing herself, putting herself in a position where she could be talked into
it.
That's her sin.
And notice, but without her willingness to ignore her husband or to turn away from her
husband or to accept what the monster was saying, none of this would happen.
And this is what Milton and I think the Bible says it even clearer.
Jesus says it as much, right?
The sin is what you do, not what you've done.
Take, for instance, Jesus says, I tell you, there's nothing you can put into your body that will make you sinful.
Sin comes from the heart.
It comes from lust and greed and envy.
She clearly had her heart turned away from him, even for a short time, to it.
That was the sin.
The apple was just the logical conclusion of that.
And you said it perhaps more economically than I did, but that's exactly right.
The result of the sin, biting into the apple, is the result of the sin she's already committed.
She has turned away from God and the husband, and she is flirting with evil.
That's the sin. Adamson is more conscious, right?
He knows what she's done, but he let her do it.
So when he eats the fruit from her hand, that is a much graver.
He's not seduced.
He is not tempted.
He has chosen her via the apple over God.
And that is why Adamson, I think, is gravely more important.
Well, that's really fascinating.
The bar analogy, if I sort of think about maybe the wife is feeling that the husband is kind of distant or she has that great suspicion that women have that men are there not for themselves in terms of their ideas, morals, personality, conversation, that the men are not there for the woman's personality but they're there for the woman's body.
Right? That's, you know, will you still love me?
Like, tonight the night of love is in your eyes.
Will you still love me tomorrow? So, that's the great fear.
I mean, the great fear of men is that women are just there for money, and the great fear of women is that men are just there for sex.
And so, she starts to flirt with another guy at the bar, but Adam's inaction at the bar...
Is what moves her step by step closer to the other man.
Because if you cared about my soul, if you cared about me, it's almost like a love test.
If you cared about me, you'd tell me to stop.
I mean, I remember many, many years ago, a friend of mine who had this sort of like no-rules parenting, and his kid was like eating sugar and was like saying, Dad, you're supposed to stop me!
You're supposed to stop me! And she was very aware of the sort of lack of...
And I certainly agreed with her that he was supposed to do something.
So she moves closer and closer, but it's almost like a test.
Do you love me for me, or do you love me for sex?
And again, I know we're in a pre-sex situation with Adam and Eve, but in the analogy that you make, she moves closer because he's paralyzed.
Now, why is he paralyzed?
If he was motivated by what was virtuous, what was good for her, he'd say, hey, nice try, but, you know, eyes over here, like this loosey-goosey guy, who cares, right?
He's just got abs, I've got virtue.
But he doesn't say that.
Now, why are men paralyzed with regards to women?
And this is one of the great modern questions of the world.
Why are men so paralyzed by women?
Well, if men are there as moral participants, and we all need moral leadership when we go astray, and in this case it's Eve who's going astray, and Adam refuses to assert his moral leadership.
Why? Because he's scared of losing her.
He's not... He doesn't want to keep her virtuous.
He doesn't want to lose her presence.
Does that sort of make sense? It does.
And so he won't intervene when she's being seduced by evil because he just wants to keep her.
He doesn't want to keep her good.
And because of that...
Virtue is revealed as weak and vice is revealed as strong.
And women, like men, are drawn to that which is stronger because that's where the protection comes from.
Because she's going to have, you know, in the sort of modern analogy, she's going to have babies, she's going to breastfeed, she's going to be disabled, she's going to lose her sexual market value, she needs a man to provide and protect.
So if he will not intervene because he's too scared to lose her and he'll let her be drawn into evil, in other words, he would rather keep her evil than risk losing her by being virtuous, Good is weak, evil is strong, and that's where she goes.
And the one thing that's missing from the equation, well, two things actually, what you said is right, but don't forget by turning away from him to test him or test how much desire he has for her, don't forget the element of humiliation.
It's not just he wants to keep her sexually, but it's humiliating.
It's emasculating what she did to him.
That's where the sin is, right?
Her focus on the serpent takes away from his very masculinity.
And that's the first thing.
And I don't want us to lose another point of the analogy as well.
There are artificial stimulants here, right?
The tree is alluring.
God said you'll be...
You started off talking about this.
There's a great allure about the knowledge of good.
Who wouldn't want that, right?
Who wouldn't want what the snake is selling?
So you've introduced something else into the equation, like at the bar, a stimulant, something that dulls moral faculty, right?
And the tree is certainly soporific.
The tree is certainly...
It's heady. In fact, it tells us in the Bible that when she eats it, she almost metaphorically has an orgasm.
I mean, it thrills her, right?
And so when you add to what you said, the act of humiliation, right?
That's why you don't act to some degree.
There's a certain humiliation in that for the man, right?
That he shouldn't have to stand up to this guy.
Oh, and by the way, this guy could probably kick his ass, right?
Because this is a major thing you're dealing with.
This is the fallen angel you're contending with.
How is he going to fight that?
Or how's he going to deal with that?
And by the way, violence is also sinful.
Theoretically, because there has been none.
What is Adam going to do here?
Is he going to be the first person to murder something?
I think from Adam in particular, without any experience, he's put in a very bad position from her.
This is why... People who don't like Christianity and particularly feminists, they attack the Bible for exactly this, blaming Eve.
But if you read the story like we're reading it, actually, Adam is much more responsible, number one, because of his higher exalted state.
And number two, Eve's behavior here is...
What's the word to phrase this?
Her sin is more naive in some way and not nearly as knowledge-focused as his.
So in every way, this is not an indictment primarily of the woman.
But what she does here, and like I said, she's seduced.
That woman – your wife sitting next to you at the bar in any other circumstance would not be flirting with this guy, but she's had a couple of cosmopolitans, right?
And so that tree, that tree with all of what it stands for and all of what its allure is – think about how you made it – you haven't said it like this.
I will say it. Why do women seek the bad guys?
Why do women ignore the guy with the pencil, the plastic – You know, pocket protector who's going to make $400,000 a year being an engineer.
Why do they reject that guy for the dude on the motorcycle and the ripped jeans?
This is a corollary of this, right?
There is something about that badness that is, like you said, bad becomes powerful and sexy because it's rebellion.
I mean, this is what our kids go through, right?
Rebelling is the only way sometimes So Satan, in a way, is targeting Adam's status through Eve and attempting to lower the status of virtue He was lonely, right?
Eve was created because he's lonely, so Adam is like, well, if I lose Eve by asserting the moral law and, quote, controlling her behavior or convincing her, right?
Because his enemy is not Satan.
His enemy is Eve's temptation, right?
So if he thinks he's going to, oh my God, that's a giant snake!
I can't win against a giant snake!
I mean, how many times a day do we say that?
I mean, obviously, not as many as we should.
So, Satan is targeting Adam's status and he's saying, I have power, Adam is weak, and Adam is weak because he fears loneliness and More than evil.
And so he will surrender your virtue to keep you around, and that's weak.
And then she cleaves to Satan because Satan shows strength.
Women cleave to strength.
I mean, this is just a... Men cleave to sexiness, women cleave to strength.
It's a bit of a sin, but it's kind of inevitable given the differences in child investment, in child rearing.
Well, notice too what Adam could not have done for her that the devil does.
Adam could not tell her.
She is more beautiful than God.
Adam could not say to her, you are greater.
I love you more than the God who made us.
But Satan says that to her, right?
And so it's an elevation.
And I'm going to do trigger warning right here.
This is outrageously out there, but I'm going to say it anyway.
Now, of course, there were no apples in the Middle East.
So the idea that this is a fight over an apple is nonsense.
It's much more likely it was a pear or something like that.
Now, think about what the serpent is dangling in front of her.
If he's dangling a pear in front of her, which looks a lot like a couple of testicles, it becomes much more seductive when you consider it from that perspective.
And again, I don't want to take out of the equation here.
Neither one of them at this moment, Adam and Eve, are completely in their right moral minds.
They're close to a tree.
They shouldn't go near. This tree, again, is sensual.
It is visceral.
It gives off pleasing odors.
It is something that you would want to taste.
It looks appetizing.
And then you've got the serpent there, right?
And they've not heard the serpent speak the language before.
This is a serpent that argues that I ate the fruit.
And because of that, I went from a crawling beast to a conscious, sentient, Interlocutor with her.
Look what happened to me.
Look what will happen to you.
And then uses that to separate her from Adam, right?
Your husband doesn't want you to know this.
Your husband has artificial power over you, but you have power over him.
So you add to that what I call argumentum ad feminism, right?
Because this is how feminism has worked in academic circles for the last 50 years.
Men hate you.
You start from the premise.
that all masculinity is toxic, then every aspect of masculinity goes away and
that's what you see in our culture right now.
The wages of sin is death. Also a sentence that has been scrolling and
rotating around in my brain since I was a kid. The wages of sin is death. Now I
understand the traditional, and correct me where I go astray of course, but I
understand the traditional Christian imperative around that is, well, you get
to live forever if you live a virtuous life. You rejoin God in heaven and you
live forever. The wages of sin is death. But of course it's not quite true
because in a lot of Christian traditions you go to hell and you live eternally in
damnation or you are separated from God, you live in a kind of limbo and so on.
The wages of sin is death.
Now... The way that it works in my brain, which has nothing to do with objectivity, I'm just putting out this as a personal opinion, the wages of sin is death.
If you commit to virtue and integrity, your deeds and life become immortal in a way.
I mean, that's Jesus, right?
I mean, he didn't have kids, but he had 2.2 billion offspring, sort of like the...
Oh, what's the name of that book?
It just popped out. The old school teacher who said, I never had any children, but I had tons of children nonetheless.
Mr. Chips? Yeah, Mr.
Chips, the three-day wonder of writing that occurred out of that.
Yeah, goodbye, Mr. Chips. Thank you. So I think back, of course, upon the sort of original thinker is Socrates in the philosophical tradition.
You think of all the people who lived, who followed their lusts, who followed their pleasures, who followed political power, who money-making and all of the lusts of the flesh and status and all of that.
We don't even know their names.
We don't know who they are.
There obviously would be some offspring scattered across the world now.
But if you actually live with integrity, I sort of say to my audience, I have this bizarre 500-year business plan because philosophers generally only redeem centuries after they're dead and gone.
So I'm in a sense trying to live forever through a particular kind of integrity.
The wages of sin is death.
It's like if you follow the animal, if you follow the beast, if you follow the flesh, the flesh dies and everything that you are will die with you.
Because there's nothing that outlasts your body.
But if you live with a kind of integrity and hopefully inspire other people to some kind of virtue and honesty and courage, that spreads in a way that you will be remembered long after your flesh is gone.
Well, your flesh is gone. Your descendants, you know, a couple of generations, it's like, yeah, that's just some guy in a picture of the attic.
You don't really remember you in any way particular.
But when you think of...
The people throughout history who had some kind of God-given or integrity-given or moral-given light or inspiration to them, they do live forever.
And they are the stars that never go out, that shine even during the daytime, that inspire people thousands of years away.
So the wages of sin, just following the flesh, is you will die as the flesh will die and nothing about you will be remembered because there's nothing about you that's exceptional or speaks to people in the future who are following their own flesh and are informed by that rather than anything you did by doing the same thing a thousand years ago.
There is a kind of immortality in integrity and I think that is what that has something to do with.
I think that's well-reasoned out and very philosophical.
But I think you left God out of that equation.
We go back to the Garden of Eden where that phrase was uttered, right?
We go back to the first sin, which is clearly about God.
And the one thing I would add, the psychology of what you just said is brilliant.
But to my mind, you've got to go back to God who uttered that phrase.
And when you look at it from that, you can have everything you just said if you just acknowledge this from my perspective.
Notice what God said to them.
If indeed you have free will, that means you have to be able to choose something that's not me.
I don't recommend that you do it.
It's a horrible thing.
But I am life.
He is the God of life. He is the God who created them.
He is the God who created the universe.
There is no life without him.
As Dostoevsky would say, God, by definition, is immortality.
He created life.
So if I'm going to allow you to choose something that's not life, what is the only option?
It's death, right?
It's death. That's what he means on a very visceral level, without any psychology necessarily needed.
But, of course, that's what philosophers do.
We always expound on what the tenets of truth are.
And if this is a truth tenet, right?
If God has created us, And he loves us to the degree that he makes us free because God realizes, he has to realize, if we're not free, then we either follow him without choosing to or we rebel against him without choosing to.
He can't punish or reward us or even love us if, I tell my university kids, if I create a little mini-me, right, and it just follows me around telling me how great I look, how my butt looks in those jeans, sooner or later I will figure out That's just a program.
It's not anything more than just vanity.
So freedom is necessary from Adam and Eve, because what benefit does God create I've never understood the predestination argument because if God already figured you out before, you have no choice whatsoever.
You're damned or you're saved before you ever say a word.
Well, if that happens, by definition, you really didn't have freedom.
And so how can God take pleasure in your love or...
You have the authority to punish you.
So when he says the wages of sin or death, he's simply saying, you can have me, which is the good that you know.
You can have me, who is the life, the life of you, the life of her through you.
You can have that. But you have to be free to choose something else.
And the only thing, if I am existence, the only thing you can choose is life.
Nothingness. Nihilism. And that's what this means, I think.
But having said that, as the concept of sin has evolved through culture and history, I think what you're saying about it, too, is exactly right.
These simple truths of the Bible are endlessly discussable and there are so many factors and vectors that come in that you have these really fruitful conversations about the psychology of this, the emotional of this, but when you go back to the place where that story came from, All of this wonderful commentary, all these great poems like people like Milton, all of this commentary on Scripture for 25, 3,000 years, all this dialectic and philosophical engagement with these ideas, to me,
all of that stuff, that intellectuality, demonstrates how brilliant and wise the Gospels or even the book of Genesis was, the Bible.
They don't notice what happens.
Jesus doesn't do it. Jesus doesn't go into...
Long philosophical disquisitions on why you should do A, B, or C. None of it ever does it.
He simply says, this is wrong, and I'm going to tell you a little story about why it's wrong, a parable.
I'm not even going to explain the parable to you.
If your heart's in the right place, if you seek God, you'll know what I'm telling you.
And guess what? Free will.
If you don't have ears to hear, you ain't going to see.
This is the same Jesus who says, do not cast your pearls before pigs.
If people don't want to hear you, don't convince them.
I'm not going to give my great truth to pigs who don't want to hear me.
People think that Jesus is some beanie baby who just insists on loving everybody.
The guy is a revolutionary, and he said it, not me.
I come to bring a sword, not collectivism.
I come to bring a sword.
I'm going to separate mothers from daughters, fathers from sons, the truth versus the lie, and there can be no medium between the two of those things.
Beautifully put. Beautifully put.
All right. Let's do Sin 2.0.
1.0, Garden of Eden 2.0, the beta release of self-generated sin.
That the snake is now within the heart.
Can you give me the Cain and Abel?
Hit me with Cain and Abel.
Well, I mean, to me, it's a pretty obvious on the surface story.
Yeah. What changes between Adam and Eve and their children?
Well, you're no longer in a perfect world.
You are in a sin world.
You are no longer going to live forever.
You're going to die. And most importantly, that immediately physical, emotional, and spiritual contact you had with the direct face of God is now lost for you forever in the material world.
So Cain and Abel are the first really progenitors who are trying to navigate this.
And the one thing that is required, right?
It's the most underrated of all the virtues because gratitude is realizing that the blessings or even the bad things that you suffer, they're bigger than you.
What happens to Cain and Abel is the first commandment, which wouldn't be given to Moses for how many thousands of years, but it's the same idea.
Abel It honors God with sacrifice.
Sacrifice is nothing more than gratitude.
You are simply acknowledging the God for whom all this is possible.
That's all, you know, really go back all the way to the beginning of Genesis, the one and only thing God has ever asked for, whether it's God or his son Christ.
You have to put me first.
You have to know who I am.
You have to realize that with me, you can live in this material world to get to the perfect world.
Without me, like you said, you die and you're forgotten.
And so Abel offers up to God what God is due, which is, call it whatever it is, gratitude.
The ungrateful Cain doesn't.
And just like Adam, this is the beauty of this, Steph, because the Bible keeps repeating these tropes all through human history.
The same thing Adam did to Eve, she did it, not me, is the same thing That Cain does to Abel.
Well, you made me look bad.
You're the one who's...
It's not the fact that I was ungrateful that mattered.
It's that you showed me up.
If you had been ungrateful like me, then we'd be in the same boat and God wouldn't be mad at me.
And so what happens?
Unlike the serpent who simply attempts to sin and death, Cain actually kills, right?
The first murder. And that's a wonderful image, right?
The first world, the murder...
In the history of humanity was brother and brother.
We know that most people who are murdered are murdered by their friends and family and loved ones.
And you see that pattern playing out.
And I could point you to 26 different versions just through the book of Exodus where this keeps coming up, right?
And that first commandment is gratitude.
And I would suggest to look at American culture right now or even Canadian culture.
One of the reasons we're losing civilization It's because we're teaching children that not only should they have no gratitude for their countries, they must despise them.
Patriotism is evil.
And patriotism is nothing more being grateful.
It could be misused, but it is gratitude for the country and what it's provided you.
You want to know what I believe this sincerely?
99% of the problems Western culture has is is a lack of gratitude.
Parents are no longer, kids are no longer respectful and grateful for their parents.
Everybody, particularly the younger generations, take for granted what they have.
We, as a country, take for granted that we're never going to be physically attacked, that we're always going to have these standards of living.
And I think that when Shakespeare pointed, and you and I, once you and I did a wonderful talk about King Lear, that play is about gratitude.
And Shakespeare's point is this.
The last virtue to go before civilization collapses is gratitude.
Everything else can go.
But when that last safety net, it's the last one.
When we are no longer grateful, that's when the anarchy follows.
And that's what you're seeing in the streets of Western cultures right now.
And he does the same thing with Cain that he did with Adam.
Will you confess? Where is your brother?
Hey man, I don't know. I can't keep track of everything he does.
You know, that weaseliness.
And that to me is the sin murder.
Yes, of course the sin is murder in the same way that the sin is eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
But the punishment doesn't come until after the unreality, after the denial of self-ownership.
And I think...
See, the sin is his jealousy of Abel, right? That's the sin.
And that sin becomes—just jealousy is the sin, right? Because he doesn't give God
what is due, Abel does. Abel gets pat on the head, Abel gets praised, and now the little boy
is angry because he wants the praise but he doesn't want to give up what he has to give
it. I think you're exactly right. It's the same story.
And I think God would be...
Quite upset with people to whom he gives self-ownership.
My definition of free will is it's our ability to compare proposed actions to an ideal standard.
Because it's one thing animals can't do, and even if you try to resist that, you're comparing proposed actions to an ideal standard, so there's no escaping it.
If you give somebody self-ownership, and then they deny self-ownership, I think that is the rejection of the gift.
The great gift, and obviously sometimes it feels like a real curse, is self-ownership.
You know, people said to me, are you angry about being obviously deplatformed, as you know, some years ago?
And it's like, no, no, no, no.
I own that. Who deplatformed me?
I did. I took on risky topics.
I took on stuff that I knew was going to be upsetting.
I did it for very good reasons that I absolutely stand by.
I was trying to bring peace and reason to the world by reducing social conflict and in particular racial conflict.
But no, I did it!
I don't want anyone to take that away.
And the temptation of victimhood, the temptation of unreality, the temptation of feeling hard done by, is the rejection of self-ownership.
And the rejection of self-ownership is, to me, one of the most fundamental sins.
Because you choose to not choose, and that's contradiction.
Amen. You got 100% right there.
And what does God say in the book of Revelations?
Because you were lukewarm.
I could handle you, God says, if you were a sinner.
And I could handle you if you were a great lover.
But I can't handle that.
Refusing to choose is the...
And Dante makes this so beautifully clear in his hell that the very first people you meet in hell, in Dante's Inferno, are not the great conscious sinners.
The very first ring of hell...
is those who would not choose, right?
Those who adamantly refused to choose good over evil, and they stood in the middle,
which is what you see all over our culture.
And I think what you said is 100% correct, too, that what is ownership, self-ownership?
You can only have that if you have consciousness.
That's what separates us from the animals.
We are conscious that we are something other than an animal.
And that consciousness gives us our free will.
And it's a huge burden, right?
Dostoevsky makes it very clear.
The biggest problem for human beings and the source of all of our suffering Spiritually, emotionally, mental.
Animals don't know they're going to die.
Animals live blessedly, not knowing what's going to happen to them.
They don't have to worry, like you said, about following their instincts is good, even if those instincts are your kitty cat who tortures that mouth to death before he eats it.
That's instinctive.
When you come to my house and my golden retriever humps your leg, you can't arrest him for sexual harassment.
Because we know that is their nature.
Our nature is not, and what separates us is consciousness.
And so, in other words, we're aware.
We're aware of who we are, and we are aware that That there are consequences for the things we choose, even if they're instinctive.
Hence, you cannot have free will without consciousness.
The mechanism in the human animal that triggers this free will, in my estimation, proves it, is consciousness.
Buddha made the same argument.
Life is suffering, he said.
Human life, recognizing who we are and what our fate is in the material world, that is suffering by definition.
The biggest problem human beings have, I would argue, we are conscious of our deaths.
And from infancy, we are aware of that.
And how much of what we call neurotic behavior is an attempt, things like addiction, right?
Self-cutting. How much of that is a response to the burdens?
You said it's a huge burden, Steph.
It's a huge burden to be an animal with a conscience and consciously an animal.
And I think if you got rid of our – and what would happen if you got rid of our consciousness?
Immediately the first thing would go would be our free will because then we would be just creatures of nature again.
Well, which is why when you have a dog that attacks people, we punish the owner.
Because the dog does not have any capacity to compare its proposed actions to an ideal standard, but the owner does.
It's even Adam, right?
You punish Adam for what Eve did because you didn't stop Eve, right?
The trope keeps repeating through human history.
Well, they both get punished.
She gets punished with childbirth and he gets punished with work.
So they do both get punished, but I think, yeah, that makes sense that he would...
The dog who attacks the person gets put down, too, right?
Yes. But the owner pays another price.
The dog gets put down because it's dangerous.
The owner gets punished because he's immoral, and those two are irresponsible.
Yeah, this gratitude thing, you know, I, of course, talk to a lot of young people in my call-in shows, and I hear this, you know, it's, I can't believe how much I have to pay for rent and inflation, and, hey, man, look, I get all of that.
I understand that. And one thing I sort of want to remind people is that, oh, no, you might be the second or third wealthiest generation out of the 15,000 generations of human beings.
Oh! No, no. Out of 15,000 generations, you came in number two or number three.
And all you do is look at number one and say, it's terrible.
My life is terrible.
And it's, you know, I get that you can't fill your belly by looking at hungrier people,
but for heaven's sakes, you can't say I'm a terrible athlete if out of 15,000 athletes
you come in only second.
Oh no, I only got the silver or the bronze.
It's terrible.
And it's like, can we not be grateful that at least, okay, yes, there's inflation.
Yes, there is war, turbulence.
There is the predation upon the next generation through debt, all of that sort of stuff.
Absolutely.
But we do have the capacity to have these kinds of conversations, which is unprecedented
in human history.
The fact that people are able to listen to philosophy, to listen to you, to listen to
me, that would not have been the case for you as a professor.
Yes, but certainly not as widespread as what you're able to do online.
We have this incredible opportunity to communicate in a way that has never been possible since
prior to the fall of the Tower of Babel, for heaven's sakes.
And how about having some gratitude for that, but our capacity to compare ourselves to anyone
doing better and then feel self-pity and helplessness and hopelessness is almost inexhaustible.
But to me, it's a very exhausting mindset, which is why I don't understand why it's so common.
Well, I do. I think I do.
Because what the progressive left wants is dependence.
They don't want individuality.
They don't want personal liberty.
What the socialists really want, let's be clear about this, is collectivizing humanity, which is exactly what the Tower of Babel was trying to do.
We want to deal with people as collectives, not as individuals.
Individuality gets in the way of the collective.
And here's my statement to it.
Why are they attacking gratitude?
Why is the progressive left, let's call it what it is, the globalist, socialist, materialist, atheist left?
Why are they attacking so vehemently the traditional supports of Western culture?
One of them being gratitude.
Well, think about what happens.
If you grow up generations who are not grateful, without gratitude, you will never sacrifice.
There is no sacrifice unless you're grateful.
It's the kind of excess that Abel had.
You will never suffer for it.
And what they don't want, they think by eliminating suffering, They will create a heaven on earth, right, with the Tower of Babel.
They will make heaven on earth, and therefore everyone will get along, and reason is all that we need, and everybody will no longer be emotional, no more fighting, no more disagreements.
Completely opposite of what human nature is.
Even if there's no God, it's completely opposite to what human nature is.
And I think to me, the danger of losing, not being ingrateful, By definition doesn't cause any immediate harm.
That's not going to kill people.
It's the next step.
And the next step of...
There's two things that come with ingratitude.
One, you just nailed one.
Entitlement. On the other side, an absolute refusal to sacrifice for anything other than what you want.
And I think we see both of those things in this culture.
entitled by not making them grateful, they see that not only should they have to sacrifice
anything, but others should be sacrificing everything for them.
You get the kind of revolutionary generations we're seeing now who will completely jettison
250 years of American culture in the name of socialism because they are so badly miseducated
and they've been told that their animal wants and desires trump everybody else's rights
and humanities.
Well, that's the great satanic temptation is this universal basic income and you can
You never have to grow up.
We'll give you all of the benefits of adulthood.
You can go drinking. You can have as much sex as you want.
You can do drugs, whatever you want to do.
We'll give you all the benefits of adulthood with none of the material requirements of adulthood.
We'll give you all of the benefits with none of the responsibility, all of the goods with none of the labor.
And, of course, people will pay for that with all the liberties – That exists, even the bad ones, like even the liberty to do bad things, they will end up with nothing and massive control, and that's the great illusion.
I will free you from consequences means I will free you from your humanity and probably liberate your soul from your body up against a wall in that truly horrible socialist kind of way.
Now, I want to make sure we get to our good buddy Jay.
Jesus and the revolution of sin that...
Jesus brought forward and that Jesus was killed for because Judaism, traditional Judaism, Christianity seemed to me to have quite different relationships with regards to sin.
And what did Jesus do that was so revolutionary?
Well, I think the sin was dealt with by God in the Old Testament legally.
He said, I will get into a covenant, right?
I will make a contract with you, Abraham.
I'm not going to expect you to be spiritually wonderful.
I'm not going to expect you, Abraham, to have to become philosophical in your behavior.
Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to lay out a number of guidelines and laws and commandments.
If you follow those things, I will deem you righteous.
That's the word in the Old Testament, righteous.
But righteous, as Jesus points out, is simply being legal.
You can be—the slave owners who owned slaves were righteous because they had a right to—slavery
And as long as God said in Deuteronomy, treat the slave, the widow, the orphan well.
That's righteous. So in other words, it's the letter of the law.
Whatever God has said we must do, we do.
This is what the Pharisees' problem was.
They no longer loved the people.
They no longer sacrificed for the people.
They used the people for their own aggrandizement, right?
But it was all legal because they were righteous in the eyes of God.
They washed their hands before they ate.
They said the right prayers at the right time.
They wore the right clothing, took all the best seats at the feast, everything they were supposed to do.
Jesus attacks that virulently.
He says, no longer.
Now it's the spirit of the letter, not the legalism.
It's no longer the letter of the law, it's the spirit.
It's not enough to follow rules.
That's why, and I tell my kids in the classroom, notice what Jesus didn't do, because a lot of people wish he had.
Hand out index cards to everybody with five bullet points.
This is what you do, you get to heaven.
Notice what Jesus does, to answer your question.
It completely and utterly ratchet up free will.
From now on, it's what you choose.
From now on, it's what the decisions you make.
And if the law is wrong, if the righteousness is not good enough, you succumb to that, you are a sinner, right?
You scribes and Pharisees, you are whitewashed tombs.
On the outside, you look perfect, but inside is nothing but rotten decay because you have chosen the law.
And the law's not good enough.
It's mercy, and I go back to the word, sacrifice.
Now you're going, the stronger you are, the more you have, the more you've been blessed, the more you have an obligation to suffer for those weaker for you.
No more. You have to use your power, the gifts, in radical ways for others, particularly those with less than you, or are less than you, And this is the great redeeming.
To me, it's why Western civilizations survived the fall of Rome in the 5th century.
Because the ethos that saved us.
Because think about the Greeks.
What was the great virtue for the Greeks?
It was glory, right?
Make yourself glory.
Be Achilles, right?
Be Odysseus. That was followed by the Romans.
And the great virtue of Rome was duty.
Do your duty to your kin and your country.
And then came Christianity.
And the duty of Christianity is sacrifice.
And you can't...
Think about what Jesus did.
Jesus ended blood sacrifice.
Where human beings for thousands of years offered the blood of innocent animals for their sin.
That's a pretty good gig.
If you've got to do is, all you've got to do is slash the throat of a couple of sheep and you can apologize for the orgy you just had, I mean, I'm with you.
Jesus said no more.
I am that sacrifice.
And I, think who Jesus is.
If Jesus is who he says he is.
He is the most powerful creature to ever walk this earth.
It's not even debatable. If he is the creator of the universe, who entered into this world as a human being, then he is the power.
And yet, he was born a slave.
He was born without armies or emperorships.
He had no armies, right?
He chose poverty.
He chose weakness. He chose weak materialism.
He was nothing. He was a slave in a slave culture.
He had no formal education.
And when he died, that was the point, right?
That I'm going to—you can no longer say to this God—this is the one God in the history of gods—you can't say to Jesus, you know what?
You don't know what it's like.
You don't know what it's like to suffer.
You don't know what it's like to suffer from human infirmity and disease.
Yeah, he does, right?
And so— That's the great legacy of Christianity, sacrifice.
We built Western culture, and we created individual liberties.
And this drives me nuts.
My university kids, I tell them this all the time.
If America is this systemically racist, completely colonial culture, explain to me, children, how is it possible that human rights, civil rights, gay rights, women's rights, all of it came out of Western culture and nowhere else?
And the great legacy of Christianity, a long-winded, I apologize, but this is the answer.
To your question about the revolution of Christ.
Everything shifted.
For those who have.
Have to start looking after those who don't.
If you want heaven. You have to give of yourself.
Not cause everybody else to give.
Like socialism wants.
You must give for yourself.
And what a beauty. Even if there's no God.
There would be no need for sacrifice.
If there's no God. First of all.
Let's be clear. If there is no God.
And we're just animals. Then you might as well herd us.
Like you herd goats. Because none of it really matters.
But because of God, or at least the idea of God, I think this is the most beautiful idea in human history.
The idea that we're going to have a philosophy, a religion, a way of living in which those who have are obligated to look after those who don't.
And ask yourself the question, if everybody on earth made everybody else more important than them, you would have no racism, you would have no war, you would have no poverty, I mean, Jesus said, we're never going to pull this off.
But those of you who choose it, live it, and suffer for it, you will be rewarded for it.
Here we are, 2,000 years later.
Think about that, too.
Christianity took over the Roman Empire without following a shot.
There were no wars. There were no killings.
It's one of the only major philosophical movements that had this kind of a reach that did not need violence.
I get it.
Christians behave violently moving forward.
I get that. But Rome was conquered intellectually purely by the beauty of that idea.
And The more we bury that idea today in the name of politics, worse we're going to be.
And this is this boomerang thing that's hitting me in sort of my later middle age, which is ability in the Roman Empire is dominance, power, control, resources, status, wealth.
I mean, that Jesus goes to the wilderness and Satan says, you can have the whole planet, man.
It can be your plaything. You can run, rule, everything.
Everything. Now, that's Rome!
I mean, and everybody in Rome would be like, yeah, I mean, you don't even need to finish the sentence, Satan.
I'm signing with blood.
My offspring, children, sacrifice, goats, doesn't firstborn, doesn't matter.
And he says no.
So the idea that...
His eloquence, his wisdom, his learning, his compassion, his speaking abilities, his abilities to create spontaneous analogies, that that is not something that he should use for the aggrandizement of himself or his own bloodline.
This idea that ability is not dominance, ability is obligation.
Is, you know, when I sort of look back as you get older, you sort of look back at your life and rather than the chaos of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to and the chaos of the everyday, you look back and you say, what have I been doing?
What's the shape of all of this?
What is the purpose of all of this?
Because you start to think of your eulogies and you start to think of, you know, whatever may be written after your life.
What was the shape of it? And this idea that ability is obligation, not dominance, has been very central to my life, and it comes out of my Christian upbringing, that I have some eloquence, I have some artistic abilities, I have some charisma, and for me, the purpose of it is to serve others, not...
You know, I can't tell you over the years how many people have been like, man, if you'd gone into politics...
If you'd gone into sophistry, because I can argue the opposite position, like that was one of the things I did in Debating Club, and I've always been very good at it.
In fact, in my parenting book, I have a whole, here's why you should be violent against your children.
I have a whole chapter on that that's really passionate.
And so I can argue things I don't believe, for sure.
That's, I think, one of the things you have to do to be considered even remotely intelligent or aware.
And so the idea that I took...
I'm not trying to sort of big self-praise thing here because it's a very humble thing.
Okay, so I got some gifts.
How should I use them? And the Roman answer and the Greek answer is to win, to triumph, to drink the blood of your enemies, to take more women, to whatever, like this really tribal, primal, half-ape, half-lion approach that my skills and abilities, which, by the way, I did not earn.
I did not. I was not gifted.
I didn't earn this. You know, like I'm born with the brain I'm born with.
I'm born with some eloquence.
I'm born with some reasoning capacities.
I can't say that they're mine.
I mean, if I make a picture, okay, I made a picture.
But I didn't earn the brain that I have.
Hopefully, I can put it to some good use in the world.
You're being grateful.
There's your gratitude right there.
Yeah, it's like, wow, I got a real funhouse mirror of a brain gang going on up here atop of the cerebellum.
It's really cool. It's a great place to be.
It's very exciting. It's a lot of fun.
What's it for? Is it for me to make money?
Is it for me to gain power?
Is it for me to provoke envy in others?
It's like, no! Since the very beginning of everything I've done, I have a lot of vulnerable people call me in the call-in shows.
I always say the same thing. I can't tell you what to do, and even if I could, I wouldn't.
The purpose is for you to think.
The purpose is for you to understand.
The purpose is for you to follow virtue and reason.
And this idea that to be blessed, and it is a blessing.
Blessing is the best word that there is because I did not earn who I am.
You know, one of my best friends died when I was 11 years old.
He just died in his sleep, congenital heart defect.
Did I earn being 57?
I did not. Yeah, okay, I exercise, I eat well, blah, blah, blah, blah, but my friend was an athlete and died in his sleep when he was 11 years old.
All of these extra 46 years, I didn't earn those, I just happened to be lucky, and what should we do with our good fortune?
Should we sort of pretend that it's all ours and we just made it all and built it all ourselves?
Or should we say, I've been very lucky in what I've been given.
What is that luck for?
Well, surely it should be to try and make the world a better place, to try and deepen and widen people's understanding of the truth of facts and to try and serve virtue perfectly But, you know, and this is the example of Jesus that nobody wants these days, which is why the virtue signaling is so much fun.
I mean, you know this.
You've had your complaints. I know this.
I've had my issues. How does serving virtue do with regards to what evil people want?
Well, you can interfere, you know, come not between the dragon and his wrath.
And his prey, if you stand between the evil doers and the evil they want to do, or you take away their victims or the people they're exploiting, they tend to get kind of upset, to put it mildly.
And so the idea that you can have virtue without risk, that's why God or nature or philosophy or whatever puts in us such a desire for virtue, because it's the most extreme sport that there is in the universe, is to be a good person.
It feels like that. And all the people who say, well, I want virtue, and I want all of that wonderfully good feeling of virtue, but I don't want to harm the interests of any evildoers.
It's like, well, that's not virtue.
It's like saying, oh, I have a great medicine for an illness.
It doesn't do anything negative to that illness at all.
It's like, well, then it's not a medicine by definition.
So this idea that we can have people, this is, I think, what the devil gives you.
He says, I'll make you feel good.
I'll make you feel virtuous.
By having you attack other people, oh, these people are bad, I'm going to go attack them.
Then you'll feel virtuous, but there'll be no risk in it.
And I think that is, there has to be a danger in it, and I think that's not the, whether you say Socrates on the secular side or Jesus on the theological side, if you don't get that, you can't be good.
Risk is another synonym for sacrifice.
Because when you risk yourself, you make yourself vulnerable.
And you are sacrificing. And you, very interestingly, in your wonderful comment just there, you called yourself a couple of times blessed and other times lucky.
And to me, that's the razor's edge.
Lucky means coincidence.
Lucky means unfair. It means that random. It means maybe you weren't lucky at all, right?
Because in some other ways, you are unlucky, right?
Certainly with hair, you and I didn't check in. But my point is that blessings come from a blesser,
right? There's a difference, right? A blessing is somebody who's blessing you with gifts
they expect you to do.
And that's Jesus' argument, right?
God made you to do something for him.
He gave you what you have to pay him back, right?
Don't hide our candles under a bushel.
You've been given gifts.
You've got to lead into the world with them.
And how about that wonderful parable of a guy, the rich man's going away, the rich man's God, right?
He gives One talent, a gold piece, right?
But we know the pun.
One gold piece to one servant.
The next servant gets five.
The next servant gives ten.
And he goes away. Comes back years later and calls the three servants.
And says to the one he gave five talents, what did you do with ten talents?
What did you do with my talents? He says, oh, I invested.
I know you're a hard man, sir.
I know that you expect return.
So I took your 10 talents and I turned them into 10 more.
Here, take the 20. The same with the guy who got five.
I know you're a hard man.
You gave us so that we would make more.
Here's your 10 of the five you gave me.
And that last little punk says, you know what?
Because this sounds like mean. It sounds mean.
One of the things that Christianity is...
The poor little guy who only got one talent.
He says, I wrapped it in a napkin and I buried it underground because I know you're a hard man and I didn't want to lose what you gave me.
And he throws that servant out of the house and says, I'm going to take your one talent and give it to the man who has 10 because you have failed.
Now from a socialist perspective, This is horrible.
This is why you Christians are nuts.
But it has nothing to do with money.
They always think about material when they see this.
It's spiritual gifts, right?
And if God gives you even just one little thing that you can do, he expects you to do it and do it for the greater need of others.
And I would be tragically remiss if I didn't at least take a moment to follow up what you said about the three temptations of Christ.
This is where we come full circle to the beginning of this talk.
Two things we started with was sin, and then I argued that sin only exists if you have freedom, right?
Which I think is logical. And this is exactly what happened.
People forget the temptation of Christ in the wilderness.
Well, he was tempted. His free will was tempted.
The devil took him away.
And don't forget, he had been fasting for 40 days.
He was weak. In fact, the devil picks the time.
Same with Eve, right? We talked about that in the Garden of Eden.
The devil chooses the times that you're weak, not strong.
And so Jesus is taken to the wilderness, and he has three temptations.
And my God, are those three temptations huge?
The first one is, quite literally, materialism.
The devil says to him, you're hungry.
Now, I'm not stupid, the devil says.
I'm not going to feed you because you couldn't take food from me, but you're the son of God.
If you are who you say you are, you go ahead and command those rocks to be stoned.
Because even your father...
Those rocks to be stoned. Wait, not stoned.
Exactly. No, you said command those rocks to be stoned.
You mean to food, to make food.
Oh, I'm sorry. And a bread.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and think about what that is.
What is the answer to human suffering?
Well, just material stuff.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
Throw yourself down, because in your own scriptures, it says that the angels will take the Messiah and bear him up, lest he so much as stub his toe.
And this, of course, is the second great materialist temptation.
If you are God, prove it to me.
If you are the Son of God, I will only believe you if you empirically verify it.
And Jesus says, you will not test the Lord your God.
Right? Faith is free will.
Think about faith for a quick moment.
Faith is the biggest thing that human beings have that is related to free will.
We are never more freely accessing our wills when we believe in that which we cannot verify, and that is God.
If we believe in God, that is the greatest act of free will you have because you have nothing material to verify it.
That's why faith is so important.
And then the one you pointed out real quickly, He takes the devil, takes Jesus to the top of a high mountain and says, he shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, not just in the Western culture, and the glory of them.
That's that Greek word again, right?
The feasting, the orgying, all that stuff, the money, the wealth, the power.
And notice who it belongs to.
Notice who God seeds it to.
All this I will give to you, the devil says, if you just fall down and worship me.
There's your undermining of the first commandment.
What I want to be is the god you worship.
You worship the devil, you get worldly trash.
You worship God, you may suffer here, but that will be reckoned unto you.
And my last comment is, it's not just Greece and Rome.
Socialism, communism, and fascism.
These are the Greece and Rome for today.
They are atheist philosophies.
They are materialist based.
And what do they want?
Glory. They demand duty from their legions and they want wealth and conquest.
That includes Islam too.
They want those things.
So what we managed to get away from with the Christian era, to some degree, human nature is human nature.
Christians did bad things too.
But what we were trying to get away from philosophical in the ancient world has come back in the atheist world of today.
And that is what you see threatening liberty across the globe.
It's Islamofascism, it's the communism, it's the socialism, all because they are materialist philosophies Anchored in godlessness.
And that's where it origins from.
The idea that I'll believe you if you give me an external marker is a great temptation.
Oh, man. You know, people say to me, well, hey, man, you don't have a PhD from Stanford in philosophy, so why should I listen to you?
And it's like, you know, the whole point of philosophy is to reject the IQ from authority, right?
So that's number one.
Or people say, well, I'm going to need to see you give an IQ test live before I listen.
And it's like... No.
Why would you – okay, let's say I have an IQ of 9 billion.
Does that mean I'm right? Nope.
You're just listening to a number.
You're not listening to an argument.
The argument should stand and fall on its own merits, not based upon some sort of marker from the originator.
It's a way to avoid thought, and to avoid thought is to avoid responsibility.
That's what people don't like.
So they're looking for some external markers.
Who should I follow? I mean, you know, this is – Governor DeSantis has been sort of mocked for this height thing.
It's like, well, but he knows the reality that in any political conflict, particularly between males, the taller guy gets voted in.
It's sad but true.
People, well, he's taller, therefore he has better policies.
Or like ever since the age of television, politicians have to have hair, which means only 10% of men who are in old age are available for the political arena, and that's terrible.
You're just kicking out 90% of the talent, and probably with a little bit more humility.
So this idea that if you come with a sign, I'll believe you, it's the avoidance of thought, it's the avoidance of judgment, of evaluation, of responsibility, and thereby a free will.
You're asking to be bowled over.
That was a very subtle thing that Satan did.
did. He said, I want people to believe in you, not the truth and their own evaluation
of it. I want them to follow you. And I always say to people, like, forget about me. I'm
relatively unimportant. It doesn't matter the equation, the arguments that I make, the
evidence I put forward, that's what matters. Forget about me. It doesn't matter. Because
people want to get drawn to the person rather than the arguments because that way they don't
have to accept the mantle of free will and responsibility.
And so this idea that, hey man, you'll convince a lot more people if you fly. You'll
convince a lot more people if you're emperor of the world.
You'll convince a lot more people if you do more miracles.
And it's like, but I won't convince anyone.
They'll just be following signs rather than thought, and they'll stay slaves.
You know, and we go back to sacrifice, which is a consequence of gratitude.
The funny thing about the life of Christ and his ministry, the only one who died was him.
He did not subject anybody else to death.
His idea did not result in the death of anybody else.
That he literally, quite literally, not figuratively, became the sacrifice.
And that was an act of will.
I mean, as the Son of God, if that's who He is indeed, then He is the only sinless
one to have ever walked the earth, number one.
And number two, the sinless one who was innocent is the only one in His philosophy who suffered
that great sacrifice.
And I always marvel at the crucifixion scenes, because according to the Gospels, Jesus gave
every drop of blood He had.
There's that great story where the centurion Not sure if he's dead or not, takes his lance and pierces Christ under the ribcage, and you get a couple of brownish drops of water and then water.
And I have always philosophically been blown away by it, because you and I are philosophical minds.
Let's say for the sake of argument, if Jesus had come to this earth as the Son of God at 33 years old, he gathered together Galilee, and he took a rose thorn, and he pricked his finger and shed one Blessed drop of divine blood.
Would that not have theoretically been enough to wash away the sins of all mankind?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
That one drop of blood, that sacrifice from the only sinless one could easily have done the job.
So why did he go through the dramatic spectacle of bleeding out entirely?
Because it wasn't about just the blood.
It was the sacrifice.
And to give blood the way that he gave it, again, puts him in a position where of all the gods that ever existed, the one you cannot say of him.
There's a great 18th century poem, and I'm going to mangle the last four lines of it.
But it goes something like this, speaking about Christ.
All the other gods were strong, but you were weak.
They marched to their thrones in glory, but you alone were weak.
But it includes like this.
But only God's wounds can speak to our wounds.
And the only God of wounds is you, right?
I mangled that, but I hadn't thought about it for a long time, but that's it.
That's what separates him for the others.
He gave every drop.
He gave everything he was as a sacrifice.
And his only commandment to his followers were, pick up your cross and follow me.
Do what I have done.
And the more you do it, and one of my favorite quotes from the Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky from the great saint, Saint Zosima, Father Zosima, he says, I cannot prove to you that God exists, but you can become absolutely confirmed that he does.
I can't prove it, but I can give you a trick to know for sure it's true.
He said, love actively.
Virtue signaling is passive love.
Left-wing love is passive.
We love black people.
We love gay people.
We don't sacrifice anything for them.
We don't do anything for them, but we love them.
That's passive love, Father Zosima said.
Love to the point of suffering.
If you do, he called it active love.
If you love actively and you keep doing it, you will be absolutely convinced that there is a God.
That's the only way.
And I think in my life, I think it's truth.
And you, without bringing the God stuff in, you just said that about you.
Because of your recognition philosophically that serving others was better than serving you, even though you had the gifts to serve yourself, you see what a blessing that is.
And you've said before, you know, whether it's God or nature or whatever.
And in the end of the day, maybe that's not important.
They're placeholders. But doing what certainly Christ tells you to do, to love to the point of suffering.
I don't know anybody who's ever done it in my life.
I've never met anybody who's done that, who's ever regretted it or ever lost the moral for that story.
Well, and there's almost no surer way to understanding virtue than to do good, because doing good exposes you to evil, and through evil you bounce to necessary virtues.
So I think that's another reason why they say love actively, and then you'll realize what you're fighting against.
All right. Great conversation.
I just wanted to give people the opportunity to find you.
If you could talk about your site, your educational availability to people and so on, that would be great.
Well, we give talks all across the country.
We do a lot of what you do.
We have a lot of media site here.
This is Freedom Project Academy.
It's an online Christian classical school.
We have live teachers, which is the rub.
We have live teachers, live classrooms.
Kids have... Classmates.
We create a virtual classroom.
So for kids who want to do school at home or moms who want to homeschool but want somebody else to do the grading and the assignments and have the classroom interaction, we can do that.
That's Freedom Project Academy.
And we have a wonderful media arm of which the Dr.
Duke Show, which we do five days a week.
You can get the Dr.
Duke Show app on any place you get free apps.
It's completely free. You can get it on Rumble, any place.
And so FPEUSA.org.
FPEUSA.org is where you can access all of this.
Certainly we're going to put this video up.
I know you'll put it up on your networks as well, Steph.
And it's really great to be here with you again.
Our conversations never last a half hour, do they?
We've got time. Well, thanks, Emil.
Great pleasure to chat again.
I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
And thanks for coming on.
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